Specifics of the language implementation of the genre of top-managers’ message in the annual report (based on the Russian language)

Abstract

The article is carried out within the framework of the analysis of institutional business discourse and is devoted to the problem of genres in corporate communication. The paper aims to reveal structural-linguistic and communicative-pragmatic peculiarities of the genre of top-managers’ message in the annual report in Russian language. The article considers the genre as an open and flexible scheme in a prototypical model with different frequency of elements. More and less typical sets and narrative schemes are described, which make it possible to establish genre relatedness in the type of text under study. Typical speech patterns and their sequences are also established. The scientific originality of the study lies in the fact that the change in the genre-forming factors of the top-managers’ message in annual reports belongs to one of the insufficiently developed areas in Russian linguistics. In this regard, for the first time an integrated approach to the linguistic analysis of this genre has been implemented on the Russian material. As a result of the analysis, it was revealed that the elements of the genres of business letter and report are the most frequent in the type of text under analysis. It has been established that the category of addressee serves to vary the distance between communicants. It is also demonstrated that the described discursive practices of constructing written speech in the top-managers’ messages in annual reports of Russian companies are due not only to the informing, but also to the argumentative function.